


Wonderland

by gwyllion



Category: Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-17
Updated: 2011-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 02:41:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyllion/pseuds/gwyllion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Last Author Standing Prompt: Belonging.<br/>This one is dedicated to soulan, one of my favorite writers that I had the pleasure of meeting last weekend.  She made a point of telling me how much she enjoys my one-shots and I have long admired everything she has written.  We had a great conversation about fics that go heavy on the symbolism!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wonderland

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Soulan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soulan/gifts).



The lone cowboy sits by the fire, the knotted wood of the gnarled log pressing uncomfortably into the back of his thighs. No matter how he shifts in his seat, a dull ache seeps up his hips and into his spine.

His hat pulled down tight, he clenches his jaw, keeping his words inside as if a sworn code of silence prohibits their escape into the night air. The fire crackles. The last of the dampness hisses out of the green wood he chopped early this morning.

His head stays low. His amber eyes watch the glow of diminishing flames.

Worn down by life, at only nineteen years of age, the loneliness is something that he has accepted for so long that it requires no more questions.

His sheepherding partner takes the pot of boiling water from the fire. It’s Jack’s turn to clean their mess after a silent dinner. He scrapes the pots with the rusty spatula that they’ll use to flip their eggs in the morning. Ennis remembers his Mama from when they’d lived in Sage. She’d rinse the dishes and dry them with a ratty green dishtowel or set them on the wooden rack for the water to drip from their chipped edges. He wondered how she’d decide the proper technique for drying each object or dish. He’d ask her how, if he could, but she’s been gone five long years now, since her husband missed the only curve in the road, orphaning Ennis and his older brother and sister on a rainy night.

Callused hands encircle the dented tin coffee cup. Nicked fingers hang on for dear life, a shot of whiskey loosening Ennis’s hold on his tongue. His brother and sister did right by him, he is able to say with the liquor unfurling in his belly, the smoothness creeping up his throat to set his words free. Both siblings have gone off and gotten married, started families of their own, abandoning Ennis to do the same, since they had no room in their meager homes for a brother who only possessed the menial skills of a ranch hand. Neither sibling could afford another mouth to feed.

By the fire, Ennis has no place to go, except to ride up to the pasture to bed down the sheep, or to curl up in the bedroll for forty winks beside Jack, their usual nightly camp tasks completed beneath the waning moon.

He watches Jack move, gracefully pulling the rope hand over hand, raising their food bag to keep the vermin out of their stores. Jack ties the knot and catches Ennis’s eyes from across the firelight. Ennis hides his smile behind thin lips pressed tight.

Ennis wonders if other boys like him feel the same as he does, hiding from himself.

Jack shoves his leather work gloves into his back pocket, and takes steps across the gravel toward him.

Ennis reminds himself that Jack was spared the lesson taught in blood and violence by Ennis’s father. No, Jack’s easy ways make Ennis decide. No, not all other boys share Ennis’s fears. Other boys weren’t forced to shun themselves because of a father who brought them to see the effects of their immoral thoughts on what was once living flesh. Other fathers didn’t make their son the lone living victim of an efficient genocide.

Jack slumps down onto the log, squeezing between Ennis and a rough spot. Ennis wonders if Jack had his share of trouble back home or in school. He thinks maybe he did, even if his father hadn’t instilled in him the fear of the tire iron and the threat of a redneck lynching. Jack must have known the same misery of being different, knowing he wasn’t like the other boys. He must have known the same daily struggles that Ennis faced. Keep your head down. Become a sophomore. Stay out of trouble. Get through this year and the next and the next.

Beyond the clearing, their tent has been pitched for the night. The warmth rises off Jack’s skin. He drops his head to Ennis’s shoulder, telling him wordlessly that things don’t have to be the way his Daddy taught him they would be, no matter that Ennis has known no other way, with no place for him except the darkness of being alone, one eye open watching to see from which direction the next blow would come.

With Jack here, Ennis dares to wade through the brambles of longing, pushing aside their prickly barbs to stand free of their stabs at his skin and their tugs at his clothing. With Jack, there is someone to understand Ennis in all his simplified complexity, someone to tell him it’s alright to stop pretending he’s something he’s not. It’s okay to stop the fear. It’s okay to have the need, and the hope.

Jack lets out a long breath, long enough to make the smoke shift its direction. With his hands on his knees he pushes himself off the log and stands by the fire.

“Ennis?” Jack asks, taking one of Ennis’s work-rough hands in his own.

Ennis lets Jack pull him into the canvas tent. He lets him flick open the buttons of his shirt one by one before he collapses to the dirt floor, his head cradled in Jack’s arms.

Ennis sighs, belonging for a moment in the place where he can finally breathe for the first time in ten years, where he can exhale slack-jawed and relaxed in the middle of nowhere, where no one can judge him. He can finally be as his maker made him.

The relief feels undeserved, but it overwhelms him anyway. Ennis knows it can be stripped away by the sound of a stranger’s voice, by a plane overhead, or the barking of a tame ranch dog. But tonight it is his wonderland.

**Author's Note:**

> Wonderland was written for Last Author Standing-2011, which I won in the category of "Movies."


End file.
